Circle of Treason (12 page)

The night before the operation's onset, a massive snowstorm hit the Washington, DC, area and a late evening at the office turned into an all-night stay. Weather in Moscow was no less harsh. With frigid temperatures and snow, Hathaway spent hours on the dark streets trying to lose KGB surveillance. He was forced to abort. The next evening he made a second attempt and this time he was successful. Kulak was home and immediately recognized Hathaway's voice. He was given the news and quietly responded without hesitation or fright. He thanked Hathaway for the notification and the offer, but said that he would be fine. The call ended.

Despite Kulak's conviction that he would be safe, we continued to be fearful that it was just a matter of time before he was arrested due to Epstein's revelations. However, that did not take place; for years we heard nothing, although we had a variety of sources. It was not until the early 1990s, long before we were aware of Hanssen's treason and before the case against Ames had been proven, that we received word about Kulak. He had died of natural causes about a decade earlier and more recently his portrait, which was prominently displayed because of his status as a Hero of the Soviet Union, had been removed from the hallways of the KGB. Kulak had been correct in his pronouncement to Hathaway. He knew that it would take more than his exposure in a book written by a Western author for the KGB to take action against a Hero of the Soviet Union. What he would have been unable to fathom, we suspect, was that the KGB would continue to conceal knowledge of his treason despite reporting from Hanssen and Ames. In the end the only price Kulak paid was the loss of his place on the KGB's wall of heroes.

Whether inside or outside of the world of espionage, seemingly insignificant events may later have profound impact. The following is such a story.

During Polyakov's home leave in 1968 Sandy was asked to inventory the contents of a large bank of five-drawer safes in her branch. Dust covered the files, which contained only non-record copies of official documents
and therefore should have been destroyed years earlier. However, one folder caught her attention. Wedged among the inconsequential material in the bottom drawer of one safe was an official DO operational file (a 201) on a Soviet official named Nikolay Chernov. It contained only a few documents, including a visa request for temporary travel to New York in the 1960s and a reference to sensitive-source information identifying Chernov as a GRU officer. Who was this man and why was his seemingly forgotten 201 in a branch that did not retain such records and obviously had not looked at the file for years? Perplexed, but a new employee recently schooled in the need-to-know principle, Sandy simply took note of the Soviet's name, finished her task, and handed the pages of her inventory to the deputy branch chief.

One morning four years later, in 1972, an employee of Jeanne's in the division's Biographics Branch appeared in Sandy's office holding the file of a Nikolay Chernov and asking for a copy of the sensitive-source reporting referenced in the file. Chernov had requested a visa for a short trip to the West, including a stop in New York City.

Sandy immediately recognized the name as that of the subject of the mysterious 201 she had inventoried years before. This time she had the courage to tell her boss about the strange story of Chernov and his official file, which someone must have returned to the directorate's main files after her inventory. Later that day her chief related news shocking not only to her but also to him and a number of others in their chain of command. Chernov, code-named NICKNACK by the Bureau and later PDCLIP by the CIA, was a GRU technical officer who had volunteered to the FBI in the early 1960s and whose cooperation had been known only to a few former senior SE Division officers, obviously someone in the old branch that followed GRU cases, and, of course, Angleton.

The division immediately phoned the FBI to ensure they were aware of Chernov's planned travel, scheduled for the following week. They were not. A copy of the identical visa request had not yet made its way through their bureaucracy. Thankfully, the CIA had given the FBI sufficient time to plan and attempt to recontact Chernov, with whom they had not been in touch for about ten years. We were proud we could assist and they were appreciative of the help.

Several years passed before SE Division learned that the FBI had a successful exchange with Chernov and just how important that exchange
had been. During a brief encounter with the FBI in the New York area Chernov turned over documentary material containing thousands of leads, known to the CIA and FBI as the MORINE leads, to heretofore unknown GRU agents abroad. The FBI, in turn, quickly and properly forwarded the material to the CIA through established channels at that time—directly to Angleton and his counterintelligence staff.

Unconscionably, Angleton ensured that for three years Chernov's gold mine of information remained buried and uninvestigated in the staff's files, because he was believed to be a Soviet-controlled source and part of the Monster Plot. The voluminous reporting was discovered by an individual working for George Kalaris, Angleton's replacement, after Angleton's 1975 departure.

The volume of the material was so great that Kalaris sought the assistance of SE Division's Counterintelligence Group in the research and dissemination of the reporting to intelligence services worldwide, a project still being carried out in the early 1980s. The information included but was not limited to the Serge Fabiew GRU spy ring that had been operating in France since 1963, and the former head of the Swiss National Air Defense forces, Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, who became a GRU agent in 1961.
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In the early 1990s, some twenty years after his last contact with the FBI, Chernov was arrested in Moscow. In the more permissive post–Cold War atmosphere, he was sentenced to eight years but amnestied after less than a year. He was known to Ames and, presumably, Hanssen. One or both of them no doubt fingered him to the KGB. However, because this was a long dormant case, and Chernov had left the GRU many years earlier, the authorities delayed arresting him until they no longer faced a source-sensitivity problem.

In 1974 during his first tour abroad Leonid Georgiyevich Poleshchuk,
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a young KGB political intelligence officer assigned to Kathmandu, Nepal, became a CIA asset. He was encrypted CKRUN at the time, with a later change to GTWEIGH. To some degree the circumstances of his recruitment mirrored his impulsive personality. A CIA case officer with whom he was in contact had developed him almost to the point of recruitment, but had to leave Nepal before he could make the formal offer.
Subsequently, Poleshchuk volunteered his services to his CIA friend's replacement. In a strange twist of fate it was Poleshchuk's boss, KGB Resident Seliverstov, who deserves the credit for pushing the junior officer over the edge and into the camp of the Main Enemy. He insisted that Poleshchuk pay for a bottle of whisky the latter intended to use with one of his developmental sources. This was the last straw for the rash Poleshchuk, who saw the resident as a tyrant—a habitual abuser of the system who left his subordinates to fend for themselves. Poleshchuk abruptly left the residency and contacted his acquaintance at the U.S. embassy. He later commented that but for a bottle of booze he might not have sought the American's counsel and assistance.

We later learned that Poleshchuk's motivation apparently went far beyond anger at a domineering boss, a view reportedly also held by a number of Seliverstov's subordinates over the years. In November 1973 Poleshchuk's father passed away after a long, painful struggle. Poleshchuk wanted to return home to attend the funeral. The KGB denied his request. The following month his only child, eleven-year-old Andrei, became ill, requiring hospitalization until early 1974. Poleshchuk again asked permission to leave Nepal. Once more the answer was no. It could easily be argued that the KGB itself deserves a great deal of the credit for Poleshchuk's decision to seek out the Americans, an action that he took within a year of his father's death and his son's illness.

Sandy was supporting the nascent Poleshchuk operation at headquarters when in early December 1974 Ben Pepper, chief of the Operations Branch in the division's Counterintelligence Group, popped into her office and asked if she would like to spend Christmas in Nepal. Local CIA Chief John B, who was Poleshchuk's new case officer, had requested headquarters' assistance. He wanted someone who knew the KGB, could set up case files, refine the guidance on requirements, author cables, and provide other support as required. Thrilled at the prospect of her first overseas assignment and with the blessing of her family, one week later she was on her way to Nepal.

Three days later Sandy arrived in Nepal anxious to meet John B, a man she had never seen and with whom she had no contact instructions. But how hard could it be to identify an American official from those greeting the daily Air Nepal flight from New Delhi? This was the end of the world, after all. Unfortunately, it was more difficult than expected and
almost resulted in an operational disaster before she had been on the ground five minutes. Upon deplaning Sandy immediately saw a well-dressed Caucasian man in the mostly Nepalese crowd, who obviously had to be John B. She uttered a faint hello, but before she could identify herself by name the stranger began shouting greetings in Russian to a group behind her. Briefly wondering how she could mistake a Russian for an American diplomat, she quickly extricated herself from the Soviet contingent and bolted for the terminal building. There the elusive CIA chief suddenly appeared, introduced himself, and explained that they had to leave the airport immediately. He mumbled that he must avoid an acquaintance he had just seen. The mystery man turned out to be KGB Resident Seliverstov who was instrumental in our recruitment of Poleshchuk and who was none other than the Soviet gentleman Sandy had earlier approached. As luck would have it, they did not escape the KGB chief; he accosted John near his parked car and bluntly asked the identity of his visitor. Thinking on the fly, John introduced Sandy as a guest of the U.S. ambassador's wife. This appeared to satisfy Seliverstov and they all went their separate ways. What a way to start Christmas in Nepal.

For the Kathmandu officers involved with Poleshchuk and his various antics, the next month was a whirlwind of activity. This included meeting preparations, debriefings, initial planning for internal communications, and refinement of an exfiltration plan should Poleshchuk decide to defect rather than return to Moscow. The latter possibility was a daily concern. Poleshchuk was prone to act before he considered the consequences. It was well within the realm of possibility that he would get drunk, drive his KGB operational vehicle to John B's house, and say “let's go, I've just punched my resident in the nose.” The office had spent considerable time and effort planning for such an event, taking into account the fishbowl-operating environment of Kathmandu and the limited available options even in a nonemergency situation. That plan was soon to be tested as part of a surprise birthday party John B's officers had planned for him, fitting his reputation as a legendary prankster.

Late one afternoon the pregnant wife of the deputy chief notified John that she had an inebriated Poleshchuk in her living room demanding to be taken to the United States. The chief flew into action, initiating each step of the exfiltration when he suddenly realized that there were flaws in the original plan and he would be forced to improvise. An hour later he appeared
at his deputy's home to collect what he assumed was an even more distraught and anxious Poleshchuk. To John's officers' delight and his own anger, he was greeted with cheers of Happy Birthday. After a tirade of expletives, he soon calmed down when it was pointed out that, while he had been duped, the weaknesses of a flawed operational plan had been exposed and could be corrected.

Fortunately for all involved in the case, the revised exfiltration plan was never implemented for “the wild one,” as Poleshchuk was affectionately dubbed. Rather, he left Kathmandu in 1975 with diamonds as payment for his services, an internal communications plan, and a promise to resume contact in the Soviet Union. For ten years there was no word from Poleshchuk until early 1985, when Sandy's and his paths again crossed.